{"id":6114,"date":"2015-11-14T15:19:59","date_gmt":"2015-11-14T21:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=6114"},"modified":"2023-12-16T14:01:45","modified_gmt":"2023-12-16T20:01:45","slug":"morbid-fact-du-jour-for-november-14-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=6114","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Fact Du Jour for November 14, 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Well-Aimed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!<\/h3>\n

Not much of any note used to happen in the Bible-belt city of Jonesboro, Arkansas, a poor southern state whose main claim to fame is as the birthplace of President Bill Clinton. That is not until March 24, 1998, when a terrible act of unprovoked and unexpected violence quickly threw a schoolyard in the sleepy city into the spotlight of worldwide media attention.<\/p>\n

It was just after 12:35 p.m. at Westside Middle School when the fire alarm sounded. This was a fairly regular occurrence and, while most of the students were convinced that it was yet another false alarm, they dutifully filed out of their classrooms as they would for a fire drill. Laughing and joking, happy for a brief break from the classroom, the pupils spilled out of the side entrance of the school building into the midday sun.<\/p>\n

Then came three sharp cracks. The kids thought it was a lark. Someone had let off some firecrackers for a joke. Even when two of the students collapsed, 12-year-old Alisha Golden thought that it was the school drama group acting out some sort of play. “When people started falling to the ground, I thought it was made up,” Alisha said later. “I saw Natalie [Brooks] and Paige [Herring] fall to the ground, and Natalie had blood coming out of her head, but the blood just didn’t look real. Then when Paige fell, I thought she was just diving to the ground.”<\/p>\n

As the firing continued, however, the dreadful reality of the situation finally sank in. The children scattered for cover, screaming, most in fear, but some in agony.<\/p>\n

Whitney Coker, age 12, had just reached the safety of the gymnasium wall when she heard someone scream behind her. She looked back and saw that one of her classmates had been hit. She braved a hail of bullets as she retraced her steps and miraculously escaped injury as she dragged her friend to safety. Others were less fortunate. Eleven-year-old Brittheny Varner was bending down to help her best friend, Whitney Irving, to her feet when a bullet passed through her back and entered Whitney’s stomach; and 32-year-old English teacher Shannon Wright was shielding one of her sixth-grade pupils when she was shot in the back.<\/p>\n

As the carnage continued, someone dialed 911. The call was logged in at 12:38 p.m., just three minutes after the attack had started. The caller screamed at the emergency dispatcher: “There’s been blood loss! People with blood loss!”<\/p>\n

Police and paramedics arrived at the school four minutes later, by which time the shooting had stopped. The scene that greeted them was truly appalling. The bodies of the dead, dying, and injured were scattered around the schoolyard. Groups of terrified children huddled in doorways, screaming and crying as they awaited the next volley of gunfire.<\/p>\n

Construction workers who were working at the school rushed over and told police that, at the time of the attack, they had spotted gunsmoke rising from a wooded copse on the perimeter of the school grounds. Officers moved into the area just in time to see two figures, armed with semi-automatic weapons and dressed in camouflage gear, running from the woods toward a parked van. Armed police headed them off and ordered them to drop their weapons. The two suspects put up no resistance. Only when the officers approached did the true horror of the situation become apparent. The gunmen were in fact children, and young ones at that. As he disarmed the pair of a total of nine guns, one of the arresting officers recognized them as Andrew “Drew” Golden, age 11, and Mitchell “Mitch” Johnson, 13, both students at the Westside Middle School where the officer’s own 11-year-old daughter was enrolled.<\/p>\n

As Drew and Mitch were driven to nearby Craighead County Sheriff’s Department, scene-of-crime officers searched the woods from where the attack had been launched. They found a total of only 22 shell casings, yet the two boys had succeeded in killing five people outright and injured ten others. “Fifteen hits out of 22 shots, that’s some strike-rate,” said one of the officers bitterly. “Hell, I wouldn’t be ashamed of that myself. They might just be kids, but they knew what they were doing. They weren’t just letting off rounds for the hell of it. They were shooting to kill.”<\/p>\n

The two boys were from working-class families living in a Bible-belt community where guns are as much a part of a household’s fixtures and fittings as cups and saucers. Santa Claus had given Drew Golden a shotgun when he was six years old, and he became an accomplished marksman, practicing regularly with his father and grandfather in the family backyard shooting range.<\/p>\n

When Mitch, who was two-years-older than Drew, had moved to Arkansas from Minnesota two years earlier, he developed a deadly obsession with guns. To most kids in Minnesota guns were the stuff of fantasy but now, for young Mitch Johnson, they became a hands-on reality. Among the debris left in the woods by the young assassins was a hunter-education card made out in the name of Mitchell Johnson. That had been his passport into this new gun-toting community.<\/p>\n

The closest anyone came to providing an explanation for Mitchell Johnson’s lethal conduct was that he had recently been rejected by a girl upon whom he had developed a crush. His schoolmates remembered he had become obsessed with 12-year-old Candace Porter, one of the girls injured in the shooting. According to sixth-grader Kara Tate, Mitch had recently asked Candace to become his girlfriend, but she had told him that she was not ready to have a boyfriend just yet. \u00a0Mitch had not taken this well and had flown into a rage, frightening Candace so badly that she had approached one of her teachers for support.
\nDue to their age, Johnson and Golden were tried as juveniles and received the maximum sentence of imprisonment until age 21.\u00a0Johnson was released on his 21st birthday, August 11, 2005, having spent seven years in prison. \u00a0Golden was released on May 25, 2007, also his 21st birthday, after spending nine years in prison.\u00a0On January 23, 2009, Johnson was sentenced to six additional years in prison for an additional charge of theft by receiving and financial identity fraud for using a stolen debit card to purchase a meal from a local Burger King.<\/p>\n

The victims:
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The trigger-happy twosome:
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

6-year-old Drew Golden, making Daddy proud:
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Culled from:\u00a0Crimes and Punishment Yearbook 1999<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Arcane Excerpts: Idiotic Edition!<\/h3>\n

Of course you know the term “idiot” was originally a psychological diagnosis. \u00a0But did you know the actual definition of an “idiot”? \u00a0Well, allow A.F. Tredgold to explain it to you in his 1908 (reprinted in 1949) book Mental Deficiency<\/a><\/em>:<\/p>\n

Idiocy –<\/strong>\u00a0Idiots are defined as “persons in whose case there exists mental defectiveness of such a degree that they are unable to guard themselves against common physical dangers.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Idiocy is the most severe degree of mental defect. Not only are such persons incapable of understanding, and therefore protecting themselves against common physical dangers, but many of them are lacking in the fundamental instinct of self-protection. In addition, they are incapable of performing any useful task or of any scholastic education; they cannot wash or dress themselves; they understand only the simplest commands; they cannot form sentences, and the majority of them cannot articulate beyond a few monosyllables. They have to be looked after all their lives like little children. Speaking generally, an individual with an I.Q. of less than 25 will be an idiot. Idiots may conveniently be divided into two grades: (1) Partial or incomplete<\/strong>, in which the primitive feelings of hunger and thirst are present, and the patients may be trained to some extent in habits of cleanliness and self-help; and (2) complete, absolute, or profound<\/strong>, in which there is no power of attention and a complete incapacity for responding to any kind of training. In the United States of America an idiot is defined as a mentally defective person having a mental age of not more than thirty-five months, or, if a child, an I.Q. of less than 25.<\/p>\n

Here’s an example of an “idiot” from the book. \u00a0Looks kinda harsh in print, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s Well-Aimed Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Not much of any note used to happen in the Bible-belt city of Jonesboro, Arkansas, a poor southern state whose main claim to fame is as the birthplace of President Bill Clinton. That is not until March 24, 1998, when a terrible act of unprovoked and unexpected violence quickly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts","category-sundry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12005,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6114\/revisions\/12005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}